Stewart Butterfield Quotes

We have a choice in Silicon Valley. We can either continue to exist as an island to ourselves, focused on wealth creation and innovation... or we can understand that we are in the middle of a software revolution and answer the nation's call to provide economic opportunity and technology to places left behind.

There's no future in being poor.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

The future of America is not an entitlement. We have been given a treasure chest of gifts and opportunities, but some people are being left behind, and success is not sustainable unless it is shared.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.

Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?

The Opportunity Divide doesn't just keep our students disconnected from the mainstream economy; it prevents our businesses from growing.

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.

If large numbers of people believe they have no shot at a better life in the future, they will work less hard and generate fewer new ideas and businesses. The economy, as a whole, will be poorer.

Rising inequality is toxic to growth. High levels of inequality exclude people - both as innovators and customers - diminishing both innovation and demand.

I often think what it was like not to have much money. I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

If Jeff Bezos and I had started Amazon.com in a poverty-stricken corner of Africa, there would have been no job creation because there would be no people to buy the stuff from Amazon.com. The difference here is the American middle class, which is by every measure the most extraordinary economic achievement in the history of the world.

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

The ability to take advantage of freedom and democracy is proportional to the size of your bank account.

The middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

Like Venice’s oligarchs, America’s super-rich are destroying the social mobility that creates wealth.

The Great Gatsby Curve

These institutions are generally more skilled at getting rich off those living in the lower economic reaches than they are in preparing them for the job market.

Poverty is a national issue and needs a federal response. After all, U.S. federal government policies helped produce massive income inequality by lopsided breaks for the super wealthy.

As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.

The free enterprise system does not leave people behind.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.